Customers rue closing of Monroe store that had heart

John Sullivan

Saturday

Sep 29, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Monroe — You don't have to be a business whiz kid to know that Tatjana Finocchio was being set up for trouble. Back in February, she was told she would have her own Family Dollar store, a struggling venture with an entrance in the back of a rickety building off Millpond Parkway.

Monroe — You don't have to be a business whiz kid to know that Tatjana Finocchio was being set up for trouble.

Back in February, she was told she would have her own Family Dollar store, a struggling venture with an entrance in the back of a rickety building off Millpond Parkway.

She was not told by her corporate superiors that the store was plagued by poor visibility, bad management and rock-bottom earnings. She also did not know she'd have to hit a $1 million sales target within the year.

But calculators don't figure everything.

Higher-ups didn't figure on Finocchio and her assistant manager, Ida Salitti, putting in superhuman hours to pull the Family Dollar store together. They didn't figure that a college dropout and a single mother of two would care so much about retail jobs that paid just above minimum wage.

And they didn't figure on the community of working-class immigrants, senior citizens and Hasidic Jews from Kiryas Joel, who grew to appreciate the store in ways that even Finocchio and Salitti didn't realize until two weeks ago.

That's when a truck driver delivering moving boxes told them they were being shut down.

"We were sure that they had the wrong store," Finocchio said. "We kept checking the address, but it was our store."

Two months ago, the Family Dollar headquarters in Matthews, N.C., looked at profits and losses and decided that the Monroe Family Dollar was a basket case of a store.

But company executives were unaware that Finocchio and Salitti had created something intangible, yet meaningful, in ways beyond dollars and cents. It happened in that unexplainable way that people and circumstances sometimes click in one place and not in another.

Within a mile of the Family Dollar store is Main Street, a corridor of affordable apartments that is home to immigrants from an array of countries including Poland, Ukraine, the Republic of Georgia, Mexico, Bolivia and Hungary.

Most of the immigrants have families, few of them have cars, and none had a place where their multiple languages, multiple ethnicities and their working-class backgrounds were welcome.

That is, until Finocchio and Salitti took control of the Family Dollar store.

What happened over the next several months is testified to by the numerous petitions, letters and posters left by these immigrants and other regulars after hearing the store would close.

And this: "I absolutely love this store, and I am here at least three times a week . "¦ This store is something like our old-time stores and you will never see it again."

The need for the store is also reflected in its recent strong sales increases, which ranked among the top in the 22-store district, Finocchio said.

The need is also expressed in the ways that customers came to trust Finocchio and Salitti: the elderly woman, who handed over her wallet for the workers to take out the right currency because she couldn't speak English; the mothers, who asked Salitti and Finocchio to watch their children while they ran to another store; and the Polish cleaning ladies who came every Saturday and left their bags at the store while they went to church.

"This is more than just a place where people buy things. It's a hug," said Salitti.

At least 400 people have signed petitions sent to the corporate office. Phone calls have been made. Letters sent.

On Thursday, Josh Braverman, Family Dollar's public relations director in its North Carolina headquarters, responded to inquiries about the store.

"We appreciate the grass-roots effort, but it was basically a business decision we had to make," he said, adding that the Monroe store had hit only $400,000 of the $1 million annual sales target required of their stores.

Braverman continued: "We appreciate the support, but when it comes down to the sheer economics of it, you have to look at the numbers."

The store is closing today.

"That's what gets me," said Finocchio, choking up. "Because these are good people "¦ and they need us."

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